Google - Site Reliability Engineering
The Google SRE book is now online, for free
A server with 24 years of uptime
wow. Stratus fault-tolerant systems ftw. 'This is a fault tolerant server, which means that hardware components are redundant. Over the years, disk drives, power supplies and some other components have been replaced but Hogan estimates that close to 80% of the system is original.' (via internetofshit, which this isn't)
Evolving MySQL Compression - Part 2 | Pinterest Engineering
generating a near-optimal external dictionary for Zlib deflate compression
Year: 2017
Buzz Aldrin's travel expense claim form for Apollo 11
a mere $33.31
(tags: expenses apollo-11 buzz-aldrin funny forms)
An energy drink that contained radium was actually a thing in the 1920s
People who enjoy playing the cult post-apocalyptic game franchise Fallout are surely familiar with “Nuka Cola”. For those who don’t know, Nuka-Cola is a fictional soft drink that is omnipresent throughout the game. It glows with a sickly radioactive glow, and it satirizes America’s fascination with radium from the beginning of the 20th century. It may seem downright crazy, but a radioactive energy drink actually existed in the 1920s and people believed in its magical properties. [....] “RadiThor”, an energy drink produced from 1918 to 1928 by the Bailey Radium Laboratories in East New Jersey. William J. A. Bailey, a Harvard dropout, created the drink by simply dissolving ridiculous quantities of radium in water.
(tags: radithor radiation nuka-cola drinks soft-drinks history 1920s radium fallout)
Trump Tracker: All the Executive Orders Issued by the President
what is it, day 5? what an amazing shitshow
(tags: trump us-politics executive-orders tpp law)
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Interesting article proposing a new discipline, focused on the data warehouse, from Maxime Beauchemin (creator and main committer on Apache Airflow and Airbnb’s Superset)
(tags: data-engineering engineering coding data big-data airbnb maxime-beauchemin data-warehouse)
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'a specific type of flow diagram, in which the width of the arrows is shown proportionally to the flow quantity. Sankey diagrams put a visual emphasis on the major transfers or flows within a system. They are helpful in locating dominant contributions to an overall flow. Often, Sankey diagrams show conserved quantities within defined system boundaries. [....] One of the most famous Sankey diagrams is Charles Minard's Map of Napoleon's Russian Campaign of 1812. It is a flow map, overlaying a Sankey diagram onto a geographical map.'
Toyota's Gill Pratt: "No one is close to achieving true level 5 [self-driving cars]"
The most important thing to understand is that not all miles are the same. Most miles that we drive are very easy, and we can drive them while daydreaming or thinking about something else or having a conversation. But some miles are really, really hard, and so it’s those difficult miles that we should be looking at: How often do those show up, and can you ensure on a given route that the car will actually be able to handle the whole route without any problem at all? Level 5 autonomy says all miles will be handled by the car in an autonomous mode without any need for human intervention at all, ever. So if we’re talking to a company that says, “We can do full autonomy in this pre-mapped area and we’ve mapped almost every area,” that’s not Level 5. That’s Level 4. And I wouldn’t even stop there: I would ask, “Is that at all times of the day, is it in all weather, is it in all traffic?” And then what you’ll usually find is a little bit of hedging on that too. The trouble with this Level 4 thing, or the “full autonomy” phrase, is that it covers a very wide spectrum of possible competencies. It covers “my car can run fully autonomously in a dedicated lane that has no other traffic,” which isn’t very different from a train on a set of rails, to “I can drive in Rome in the middle of the worst traffic they ever have there, while it’s raining," which is quite hard. Because the “full autonomy” phrase can mean such a wide range of things, you really have to ask the question, “What do you really mean, what are the actual circumstances?” And usually you’ll find that it’s geofenced for area, it may be restricted by how much traffic it can handle, for the weather, the time of day, things like that. So that’s the elaboration of why we’re not even close.
(tags: autonomy driving self-driving cars ai robots toyota weather)
'Rules of Machine Learning: Best Practices for ML Engineering' from Martin Zinkevich
'This document is intended to help those with a basic knowledge of machine learning get the benefit of best practices in machine learning from around Google. It presents a style for machine learning, similar to the Google C++ Style Guide and other popular guides to practical programming. If you have taken a class in machine learning, or built or worked on a machine-learned model, then you have the necessary background to read this document.' Full of good tips, if you wind up using ML in a production service.
(tags: machine-learning ml google production coding best-practices)
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Amazing how similar the Commodore 64 techniques were!
(tags: commodore-64 apple-ii history copy-protection assembly)
Facebook is censoring posts in Thailand that the government has deemed unsuitable | TechCrunch
Dictator-friendly censorship tools? no probs!
(tags: facebook censorship royalty thailand politics)
Who killed the curry house? | Bee Wilson | Life and style | The Guardian
This is fascinating, re "authenticity" of food:
The objection that curry house food was inauthentic was true, but also unfair. It’s worth asking what “authenticity” really means in this context, given that people in India – like humans everywhere – do not themselves eat a perfectly “authentic” diet. When I asked dozens of people, while on a recent visit to India, about their favourite comfort food, most of them – whether from Delhi, Bangalore or Mumbai – told me that what they really loved to eat, especially when drinking beer, was something called Indian-Chinese food. It is nothing a Chinese person would recognise, consisting of gloopy dishes of meat and noodles, thick with cornflour and soy sauce, but spiced with green chillis and vinegar to please the national palate. Indian-Chinese food – just like British curry house food – offers a salty night away from the usual home cooking. The difference is that Indian people accept Indian-Chinese food for the ersatz joy that it is, whereas many British curry house customers seem to have believed that recipe for their Bombay potatoes really did come from Bombay, and felt affronted to discover that it did not.
(tags: curry indian-food food chinese-food indian-chinese-food authenticity)
Banks biased against black fraud victims
We raised the issue of discrimination in 2011 with one of the banks and with the Commission for Racial Equality, but as no-one was keeping records, nothing could be proved, until today. How can this discrimination happen? Well, UK rules give banks a lot of discretion to decide whether to refund a victim, and the first responders often don’t know the full story. If your HSBC card was compromised by a skimmer on a Tesco ATM, there’s no guarantee that Tesco will have told anyone (unlike in America, where the law forces Tesco to tell you). And the fraud pattern might be something entirely new. So bank staff end up making judgement calls like “Is this customer telling the truth?” and “How much is their business worth to us?” This in turn sets the stage for biases and prejudices to kick in, however subconsciously. Add management pressure to cut costs, sometimes even bonuses for cutting them, and here we are.
(tags: discrimination racism fraud uk banking skimming security fca)
How a Machine Learns Prejudice - Scientific American
Agreed, this is a big issue.
If artificial intelligence takes over our lives, it probably won’t involve humans battling an army of robots that relentlessly apply Spock-like logic as they physically enslave us. Instead, the machine-learning algorithms that already let AI programs recommend a movie you’d like or recognize your friend’s face in a photo will likely be the same ones that one day deny you a loan, lead the police to your neighborhood or tell your doctor you need to go on a diet. And since humans create these algorithms, they're just as prone to biases that could lead to bad decisions—and worse outcomes. These biases create some immediate concerns about our increasing reliance on artificially intelligent technology, as any AI system designed by humans to be absolutely "neutral" could still reinforce humans’ prejudicial thinking instead of seeing through it.
(tags: prejudice bias machine-learning ml data training race racism google facebook)
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About CSVs
Much of my professional work for the last 10+ years has revolved around handing, importing and exporting CSV files. CSV files are frustratingly misunderstood, abused, and most of all underspecified. While RFC4180 exists, it is far from definitive and goes largely ignored. Partially as a companion piece to my recent post about how CSV is an encoding nightmare, and partially an expression of frustration, I've decided to make a list of falsehoods programmers believe about CSVs. I recommend my previous post for a more in-depth coverage on the pains of CSVs encodings and how the default tooling (Excel) will ruin your day.
(via Tony Finch)(tags: via:fanf csv excel programming coding apis data encoding transfer falsehoods fail rfc4180)
Final Fantasy 7: An oral history
Pretty amazing, particularly for this revelation:
Tetsuya Nomura (Character and battle visual director, Square Japan): OK, so maybe I did kill Aerith. But if I hadn’t stopped you, in the second half of the game, you were planning to kill everyone off but the final three characters the player chooses! Yoshinori Kitase (Director, Square Japan) No way! I wrote that? Where? Tetsuya Nomura (Character and battle visual director, Square Japan) In the scene where they parachute into Midgar. You wanted everyone to die there!
(tags: games history gaming aeris final-fantasy square-enix ff7 stories)
Building the plane on the way up
in 1977, Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) scientists packed a Reed-Solomon encoder in each Voyager, hardware designed to add error-correcting bits to all data beamed back at a rate of efficiency 80 percent higher than an older method also included with Voyager. Where did the hope come in? When the Voyager probes were launched with Reed-Solomon encoders on board, no Reed-Solomon decoders existed on Earth.
(tags: reed-solomon encoding error-correction voyager vger history space nasa probes signalling)
Debugging Java Native Memory Leaks (evanjones.ca)
Using jemalloc to instrument the contents of the native heap and record stack traces of each chunk's allocators, so that leakers can be quickly identified (GZIPInputStream in this case). See also https://gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk/2015/12/11/using-jemalloc-to-get-to-the-bottom-of-a-memory-leak/ .
(tags: debugging memory jvm java leaks memory-leaks leak-checking jemalloc malloc native heap off-heap gzipinputstream)
Sanrio Introduces Rage-Filled Red Panda Character Aggretsuko
wut:
If you’ve always loved Hello Kitty but wish she also came with a deep well of rage, Sanrio has introduced just the character for you: Aggretsuko. An adorable 25-year-old red panda who works as an office associate, Aggretsuko is constantly taken advantage of and bothered by her boss and co-workers. So she deals with it by pounding beers and screaming death-metal karaoke.
(tags: sanrio hello-kitty aggretsuko funny japan anger rage death-metal karaoke)
PagerDuty Incident Response Documentation
This documentation covers parts of the PagerDuty Incident Response process. It is a cut-down version of our internal documentation, used at PagerDuty for any major incidents, and to prepare new employees for on-call responsibilities. It provides information not only on preparing for an incident, but also what to do during and after. It is intended to be used by on-call practitioners and those involved in an operational incident response process (or those wishing to enact a formal incident response process).
This is a really good set of processes -- quite similar to what we used in Amazon for high-severity outage response.(tags: ops process outages pagerduty incident-response incidents on-call)
The Irish Ether Drinking Craze
Dr. Kelly, desperate to become intoxicated while maintaining The Pledge, realized that not only could ether vapors be inhaled, but liquid ether could be swallowed. Around 1845 he began consuming tiny glasses of ether, and then started dispensing these to his patients and friends as a nonalcoholic libation. It wasn't long before it became a popular beverage, with one priest going so far as to declare that ether was "a liquor on which a man could get drunk with a clean conscience." In some respects ingesting ether is less damaging to the system than severe alcohol intoxication. Its volatility - ether is a liquid at room temperature but a gas at body temperature -dramatically speeds its effects. Dr. Ernest Hart wrote that "the immediate effects of drinking ether are similar to those produced by alcohol, but everything takes place more rapidly; the stages of excitement, mental confusion, loss of muscular control, and loss of consciousness follow each other so quickly that they cannot be clearly separated." Recovery is similarly rapid. Not only were ether drunks who were picked up by the police on the street often completely sober by the time they reached the station, but they suffered no hangovers. Ether drinking spread rapidly throughout Ireland, particularly in the North, and the substance soon could be purchased from grocers, druggists, publicans, and even traveling salesmen. Because ether was produced in bulk for certain industrial uses, it could also be obtained quite inexpensively. Its low price and rapid action meant than even the poorest could afford to get drunk several times a day on it. By the 1880s ether, distilled in England or Scotland, was being imported and widely distributed to even the smallest villages. Many Irish market towns would "reek of the mawkish fumes of the drug" on fair days when "its odor seems to cling to the very hedges and houses for some time."
(tags: ether history ireland northern-ireland ulster drugs bizarre)
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Can't help feeling danah boyd is hitting the nail on the head here:
The Internet has long been used for gaslighting, and trolls have long targeted adversaries. What has shifted recently is the scale of the operation, the coordination of the attacks, and the strategic agenda of some of the players. For many who are learning these techniques, it’s no longer simply about fun, nor is it even about the lulz. It has now become about acquiring power. A new form of information manipulation is unfolding in front of our eyes. It is political. It is global. And it is populist in nature. The news media is being played like a fiddle, while decentralized networks of people are leveraging the ever-evolving networked tools around them to hack the attention economy.
(tags: danah-boyd news facebook social-media gaslighting trolls 4chan lulz gamergate fake-news)
World's top 100 cocktails of 2016
per Difford's Guide -- Amaretto Sour, Margarita, Bramble, Espresso Martini, Old-Fashioned, Negroni, White Lady and Manhattan up there.
Raising the Roof: Comments on the recent Newgrange ‘roof-box’ controversy
Instead of discussing recent site visits or photographs we’ll be looking at a recent controversy sparked by comments about the reconstruction of Newgrange and, in particular, three claims made in the media by an Irish archaeologist; 1. That the “roof-box” at Newgrange may not be an original feature, instead it was “fabricated” and has “not a shred of authenticity” 2. That two vitally important structural stones, both decorated with megalithic art, from Newgrange were lost after the excavation and 3. That the photographic evidence that backs up the existing restoration is either inaccessible or never existed at all. I hope to show why we can be sure none of these claims are sustainable and that in fact the winter solstice phenomenon at Newgrange is an original and central feature of the tomb.
(tags: history newgrange archaeology solstice ireland megalithic)
Leap Smear | Public NTP | Google Developers
Google offers public NTP service with leap smearing -- I didn't realise! (thanks Keith)
(tags: google clocks time ntp leap-smearing leap-second ops)
How and why the leap second affected Cloudflare DNS
The root cause of the bug that affected our DNS service was the belief that time cannot go backwards. In our case, some code assumed that the difference between two times would always be, at worst, zero. RRDNS is written in Go and uses Go’s time.Now() function to get the time. Unfortunately, this function does not guarantee monotonicity. Go currently doesn’t offer a monotonic time source.
So the clock went "backwards", s1 - s2 returned < 0, and the code couldn't handle it (because it's a little known and infrequent failure case). Part of the root cause here is cultural -- Google has solved the leap-second problem internally through leap smearing, and Go seems to be fundamentally a Google product at heart. The easiest fix in general in the "outside world" is to use "ntpd -x" to do a form of smearing. It looks like AWS are leap smearing internally (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/look-before-you-leap-the-coming-leap-second-and-aws/), but it is a shame they aren't making this a standard part of services running on top of AWS and a feature of the AWS NTP fleet.(tags: ntp time leap-seconds fail cloudflare rrdns go golang dns leap-smearing ntpd aws)
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via twitter: "interesting conversation between author of a parenting book and the guy who introduced the concept of "flow"" -- summary, family life is interrupt-driven (via nagging) and fundamentally hard to align with "flow"
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wow
(tags: dick-cheney pacemakers iot internetofshit wireless security via:jzdziarski)